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OpenAI Sued for Fraud Allegations
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- generationP 3y agoTL;DR anyone? The filing takes an ungodly amount of time to load and the server might croak under HN pressure.
- minimaxir 3y agoI'd upload the PDF of the complaint, but it's 55 MB for some reason which will kill the bandwidth of any free-sharing service.
- eek2121 3y agoI was looking for a place to upload it as well. Edit: I would mirror it on one of my sites, but all my sites are pay-per-gb for bandwidth.
- encryptluks2 3y ago[dead]
- duskwuff 3y ago> it's 55 MB for some reason Because it has 280 pages of newspaper articles and white papers about OpenAI, ChatGPT, and other startups attached to it as exhibits, many of which are only tangentially related to the case.
- minimaxir 3y agoEven if it's mostly rich text, it's still text. PDF embedding is funny.
- eek2121 3y agoMultiple claims, all related to 'fraud'. Claims that OpenAI is committing fraud because they are a for-profit disguised as a non-profit, for example.
- duskwuff 3y agoThere's some pretty kooky claims and generally bizarre statements buried in the filing, such as: * "Altman and the other parties to this suit are increasing the risk of global human extinction or actual world domination by a small set of individuals for a chance to personally gain extended lifespans. It is the reasonable explanation for taking such massive risks with this technology and flaunting the law so obviously." * "OpenAI and at least one of its partners most likely filled social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit with politically charged commentary designed to push votes towards the Democrat party." (And no, the filing doesn't provide any substantial evidence for this assertion.) * "Y Combinator is, according to ChatGPT, the most notable Tech Accelerator in the world. A screenshot of ChatGPT-3.5 stating this is included as Exhibit L." * "Open-source and closed-source, not-for-profit and for-profit, are binary choices, or Booleans. Booleans are a form of data with only two possible values, which are typically opposites. When defendants drastically changed the Boolean values that structure [OpenAI]... the founding mission went from ‘true’ to ‘false.’"
- brookst 3y agoI was going to give you a hard time for the pejorative "kooky", but it turns out you were being generous and charitable.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> There's some pretty kooky claims and generally bizarre statements buried in the filing, Sure, but the kooky claims are mostly tangential to the identified causes of action except the fourth, and they aren’t the sole basis for that one, so they have marginal bearing on the overall suit.
- brookst 3y agoWould these people even have standing for that claim?
- chronotis 3y agoWithout irony, here's ChatGPT's summary: This legal complaint alleges that defendants operating a non-profit entity for the benefit of humanity have committed massive fraud on donors, beneficiaries, and the public. The complaint raises concerns about OpenAI's operation, including its dual structure as a non-profit and a for-profit entity, potential insider dealings, and the exclusion of the general public from its benefits. It claims that OpenAI has used deceptive advertising, unfair competition, and fraud to develop its valuable resource for personal gain. The complaint highlights OpenAI's mission of benefiting humanity and points out that a narrow group of stakeholders have received commercially invaluable early access to its technology. It also argues that OpenAI's for-profit operations might infringe on copyright and fair use laws, as the technology is built on large datasets, much of which is copyrighted. It accuses OpenAI of breaching trust and fiduciary duties, disrupting legal frameworks, and potentially engaging in willful and wanton negligence by increasing existential risks related to AI. Finally, the complaint alleges that OpenAI might have engaged in banned political activities, specifically suggesting that the technology may have been used to influence the 2020 US presidential election in favor of the Democratic party.
- dubcanada 3y agoHow would ChatGPT summarize something that just happened? It's not real time?
- crazygringo 3y agoWow, that's the most useful ChatGPT summary I've ever come across. I've never found it particularly useful for most articles which are easy enough to read/skim (the first and last 2 paragraphs will usually tell you what you need), but long complicated legal documents are a whole other matter. This is great.
- photoGrant 3y agoI compressed it and uploaded here: https://filebin.net/jznrmizmhtrsdwen https://filebin.net/jznrmizmhtrsdwen 6.4MB
- tzs 3y agoHow did you compress it? Gzipping the 52 MB PDF just shrinks it to 51 MB. You got it to 6.4 and kept it PDF.
- photoGrant 3y agoGhostScript! gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
- minimaxir 3y agoThe argument in the complaint is that "OpenAI said they would develop software for everyone, but they gave early favoritism to YC companies, so they went back on their promise." This complaint sounds like a high-effort shitpost. The plantiff is filing this pro se. Just see the full list of defendants: SAM ALTMAN, an individual; REID HOFFMAN, an individual; GREG BROCKMAN, an individual; ILYA SUTSKEVER, an individual; WOJCIECH ZAREMBA, an individual; JOHN SCHULMAN, an individual; TASHA MCCAULEY, an individual; BRIAN CHESKY, an individual; ADAM D’ANGELO, an individual; ANDREJ KARPATHY, an individual; PAMELA VAGATA, an individual; TREVOR BLACKWELL, an individual; BRAD LIGHTCAP, an individual; CHRIS CLARK, an individual; JESSICA LIVINGSTON, an individual; WILL HURD, an individual; HELEN TONER, an individual; TOMER KAFTAN, an individual; MICROSOFT CORPORATION, a corporation; MATTHEW BROWN COMPANIES, a company; BEDROCK CAPITAL PARTNERS I, L.P., a limited partnership; SEQUOIA CAPITAL U.S. VENTURE 2010 PARTNERS FUND, L.P., a limited partnership; ANDREESSON HOROWITZ ANGEL FUND I, LLC, a limited liability company; TIGER GLOBAL MANAGEMENT, LLC, a limited liability company; KHOSLA VENTURES, LLC, a limited liability company; HOFFMAN KOFMAN FOUNDATION; OPEN RESEARCH LAB, INC., a nonprofit corporation; CASETEXT, INC., a stock corporation; INSTACART, a corporation; ZAPIER, INC., a corporation; and DOES 1 through 10, inclusive,
- godfrzero 3y agoNot a lawyer, but my reading of this was quite different. It seems to me like the core of the argument is that "OpenAI" wants non-profit benefits while clearly profiting. While the complaint document itself is verbose, I imagine this is the kind of thing that eventually contributes to setting a precedent for how training data is handled in the legal system as well?
- moneywoes 3y agoHmm strange the captcha isn’t letting me pass
- kzrdude 3y agoI got two captchas and then redirected to 404
- mindvirus 3y agoManaged to load the PDF. It seems to be pretty scattershot, basically a collection of every complaint we've all heard about AI. Not a lawyer but key complaints seem to be: * Despite OpenAI’s mission to ‘benefit all of humanity in a broad and distributed manner,’ early stakeholders that are part of the YC network or bought in are now getting commercially invaluable early access to these systems. * These GPTs have been trained on large datasets that belong to the commons; text, images, and video freely available across the internet. This free data is typically only used for research purposes under Fair Use law. No compensation has been offered to anyone who created this data. Much of it is copyrighted. * The blitzscaling of OpenAI is problematic and illegal in a number of ways (Fraud, Breach of Trust and Fiduciary Duties, Legal Disruption, Copyright infringement, etc, etc, etc) * Demonstrates bias against Trump and not Biden.
- zdragnar 3y agoI don't know how many are genuine, but the examples I've seen of different responses to prompts with either Trump or Biden as the subject have been pretty wild. I've personally seen a few blind spots / biases in non-political topics as well, but had previously written them off as merely incomplete training data. Lately, though, I've been pondering how many accidental biases have crept in and to what extent that will shape how people work when they're assuming they are getting an unbiased answer.
- brookst 3y agoThat last bullet explains the whole thing. Suddenly conservatives are worried about the legitimacy of nonprofits, and uninterested in free speech for corporations. Shocking.
- GreedClarifies 3y agoWhile this is clearly a pathetic lawsuit, I do think it highlights that OpenAI’s status as a non profit is a sham. Likely they adopted the non profit status as a recruiting tool and they should drop it and join the ranks of for profit companies.
- kvetching 3y agoIlya has stated it's a novel business structure. Certainly ripe for lawsuits.
- tomohelix 3y agoHere is a quick summary: They are calling fraud because OAI was mixing nonprofit and capped profit to avoid taxes and the likes. They also made claims about unfair representations coming from ChatGPT and the executive composition of OAI, which apparently looks like insider trading and information manipulation. They alleged that OAI participated in election interference during 2020. They also said OAI was recklessly making advances in disruptive tech faster than legislators can make laws for them. Basically, a prime example of a vulture coming in to sue anything that looks like it can give them some money. This is part of the reason why every company need a team of lawyers to deal with this perversion of justice.
- umanghere 3y agoIt took forever to get the document off SFTC’s website, so I mirrored it behind CloudFront for everyone’s convenience. https://blog.umangis.me/static/08539708.pdf https://blog.umangis.me/static/08539708.pdf
- skilled 3y agoI think a lot of people have a lot of opinions on any kind of feedback that is related to, "OpenAI took everyone's content and is now profiting off of it.". The way I see it, the biggest losers are the average consumers. If you got skin in the game and you know how to automate the OpenAI API at scale - you're winning big. Google can't keep up with what is real or what isn't if you actually put in the work to structure the output in a useful manner. This can be done very efficiently and at scale if you know what you are doing. So, not only is OpenAI winning but so are people who know how to build content websites and know how to get them to rank. The repetitive content cycle has always been a problem on the web (which is more the reason why places like HN are so great to find actual first-person experiences), but it is about to get amplified a hundredfold. What OpenAI did is give everyone access to the Internet's content and let everyone mash it together in a way that fits their agenda. Everything that came before ChatGPT (and GPT-4) is pretty much rendered "the past". I'd definitely be pissed. That content was always there, of course. But before all this, you actually had to manually put in the work and the hours to try and piece together multiple key points from 10 different sources to create one unique perspective. OpenAI took a massive dookie on all that and just said fuck it. Let the genie out of the box and let us take a massive cut of the profits in the process. I have zero doubt in my mind that OpenAI knew exactly what they were doing. They knew what kind of lawsuits or other complaints were going to come their way. And they still went ahead and released it anyway. And they're about to go even more crazy with Plugins. I'm not expecting this to happen per se, but I do have a gut feeling that some kind of brakes are going to be put on all this because whether you agree or not, this whole thing is out of control and not being controlled properly at all.
- rlt 3y ago> you actually had to manually put in the work and the hours to try and piece together multiple key points from 10 different sources to create one unique perspective It’s supposed to be a bad thing that OpenAI is making the world more efficient?
- skilled 3y agoIt is yes, at everyone else's expense while making a profit from it. What's your point exactly?
- ftxbro 3y agoten surprising things I learned on my journey to complete the elaborate series of CAPTCHAs required by this website
- jeroenhd 3y agoA Cloudflare captcha AND a Google captcha and I'm not even on TOR. I don't know what this website is defending against but it must be botted to hell! I'm not sure what the relationship between the alleged victim of fraud and the alleged perpetrators is, but I doubt "being a member of humanity" is good enough to imply a contractual obligation. The allegation of copyright infringement due to AI stealing and remixing/republishing online content may hold water if the argument is constructed well, but I don't think this lawsuit is going to be the one answering that important open question. The litigant filing pro se also doesn't give me much confidence that this lawsuit will succeed. This seems like a rather spurious lawsuit to me. I don't know why you would possibly throw such resources against the court, but I'd expect someone suing a billion dollar company to at least get a(nother) lawyer. Honestly, the claim that both not wanting to generate something nice about Donal Trump and that YC seems to be democrat-aligned are somehow "Banned Political Activities" makes me think this person needs help. If one politician's values match more with an organization's goal or algorithmic output that's not "political campaigning", that's just a symptom of thinking alike. If reading all the internet has to say about Trump means the algorithm concludes there's nothing good to say, it's probably time to reevaluate your political compass rather than sue the tool for disagreeing with you.
- photoGrant 3y agoFor how fast and how many upvotes this submission received -- why don't I see it on the front page?